Men's European Volleyball Championships

Catalogue number	0690
Date of issue	31.8.2011
Face value	20 CZK
Print sheets	á 50 pcs of stamps, sheets are marked with bar code
Size of picture	23 x 40 mm
Graphic designer	Pavel Švejda
Printing method	multicoloured offset

Following the 2010 FIBA Basketball Championship for Women in Brno, Ostrava and Karlovy Vary, a most successfull event for the Czech players who won the unexpected silver medals, the Czech audience will get a chance to see players of another ball game, even more popular than basketball, viz. volleyball.
The Czech men's representation team won the surprising 10th place at the 2010 World Cup in Italy after they had beaten the previous world champions, the US team, 3:0, but had unluckily lost 2:3 to the new world champions from Brazil.
The championships will be hosted in Austria and the Czech Republic. The anticipated tough events will take place in two Austrian and two Czech cities. The Austrian cities are Vienna and Innsbruck. The two host cities initially chosen by the Czech organizing committee, i.e. Prague and Liberec, were recently changed to Prague and Karlovy Vary, maybe because the latter was a successful host of the basketball championship finals.
Jan Svoboda, coach of the Czech representation team, used the following words to assess the position of the Czech players in Pool B: "We did not want to get Russia or Serbia before the drawing took place. Now we are in one group with Russia, Portugal and Estonia. Portugal has also been one of the top European teams, and we were very glad we had managed to win the World Cup qualification event after the 3:2 heartbreaking finish. And Estonia would not have been our choice from the fourth, easiest group, either. It is a tough pool, and it will not be an easy task to go through. But it is our aim."
The top European tournament comes back to the Czech Republic exactly after ten years. The Czech team won the fourth place in Ostrava in 2001. Four pools, each of four teams, means sixteen teams. The winners (first position) of each pool will go directly through to the final eight matches, the runners-up (second and third positions) will fight for the next four places out of the final eight, and those finishing on the fourth position will quit the tournament. So the task for the Czech team is to end up as second or third in the pool, with the possibility to face further competitors from Pool D, i.e. Poland, Germany, Bulgaria and Slovakia.

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